Citron found a haven in Kiwanis

As I entered the Santa Ana Kiwanis Club luncheon at the venerable Ebell Clubhouse on French Street,
Mary Ellen Lohnes guided me to a seat next to hers at a table full of longtime Kiwanis members. The room was fairly full, but this seat was vacant because its most-frequent occupant for almost as long as anyone can remember died last week.

His name was
Bob Citron.

I remember going to one of the club's regular Wednesday lunch meetings in 2007 and doing a double take. Could that tall, elderly gentleman in the natty sweater be the infamous Robert L. Citron, the former county treasurer behind Orange County's bankruptcy? He had kept out of the public eye for more than a decade.

Citron was gone before I could talk to him – he didn't do interviews anyway – but as I learned, the Kiwanis Club had become his refuge of sorts. So on Wednesday, I invited myself back. Citron's friends love him and miss him.

Citron joined the club in about 1970. He was also a longtime member of another well-known service organization. After the bankruptcy and his conviction for illegally diverting public funds, he left both groups. He was sentenced to a year in jail.

“He was terribly sad,” Kiwanis member
George Upton told me Wednesday. Upton had worked in the Assessor's Office when Citron was in the Tax Collector's Office, so they'd known each other for years outside of Kiwanis.

The other organization would not let Citron rejoin upon his release. The Kiwanis Club felt differently. Upton recalls: “I said, ‘Bob, would you like me to be your sponsor?' He said ‘yes.' ”

“He was unanimously welcomed back,” said
John Karpierz, who sat at his table for years.

“Mr. Citron never made a penny on the issue,” Kiwanis President
Alfredo Amezcua reminded the luncheon audience during his brief remembrance. “He was attempting to do the greatest thing he could for the county.”

“So he came back,” Upton recalls, “and I put him in charge of selling raffle tickets.”

Every Wednesday, the club sells $1 raffle tickets. Half the pot goes to the winner, the other half to the scholarship fund. Whenever Citron won, he donated his half back to the fund.

The scholarship fund is one of the Santa Ana Kiwanis Club's signature events, and one of its oldest, going back 55 years. Every year, a panel of members evaluates applications from Santa Ana College students and awards scholarships to several going on to four-year institutions. In recent years, it has given six scholarships that provide $8,000 per year to each student for his or her final two years of college. Thus, at any one time, Santa Ana Kiwanis is supporting a dozen college junior and seniors.

Citron and his wife,
Terry, were extremely generous about helping to fund the scholarships, members said.

“He wasn't just a knife-and-fork guy who came to the meetings and ate,” Karpierz said. “He rolled his sleeves up.”

At Christmas, for example, Citron took low-income kids on shopping sprees to Target, and would deliver candy canes to special-needs kids in their classrooms – both Kiwanis programs.

I suggested that the club had become a “refuge” for him. Lohnes didn't know if refuge was the right word. Maybe that implies that had he gone out in public, he would have been harassed. But another regular at Citron's table,
Kathleen Bowman, thinks refuge is apt. Either way, refuge or not, the club was clearly a place where he felt comfortable.

Amezcua said Terry Citron recently told him the luncheons became the highlight of her husband's week. He would wash his beloved Chrysler, dress up and drive over to the club, an architectural treasure built in 1924, a year before Citron was born. “It was probably the most active he would get all week,” Amezcua said.

Although he might dress stylishly or flashy – cashmere sweaters, USC-themed garb in the fall, red pants at Christmas – Citron was a quiet gentleman, talking about music or USC sports or the latest in a line of Chryslers he owned.

“It was a hard thing he had to go through,” Karpierz said. “This is his family here, his Kiwanis family. He paid his dues. He came back and did those things Kiwanians do.”

Mickadeit writes Mon.-Fri. Contact him at 714-796-4994 or fmickadeit@ocregister.com.

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